“Come, brother,” he said; “even for a Spaniard this is futility. This is no more than knife work. I am persuaded your father was a butcher, and owed his entire practice to the loins of the Galician hog.”
Such derision galled me worse than a thrust from his sword. Casting away all discretion I ran in upon him blindly, for at that moment I was minded to make an end one way or another.
“Worse and worse,” said he. “You bear your blade like a clergyman’s daughter. Still, do not despair, my young companion; perhaps you will make better practice for my left hand.”
As he spoke, to my dismay he changed his weapon from his right hand to his left, and parried me with the same contemptuous dexterity. Suddenly he made a strong parade, and in the next instant I felt the point of his sword at my breast.
“Your father must have been a strangely ignorant man, even for a Spaniard,” he said. “I do not wonder that he lost his right hand at an early age. You have as little defence as a notorious cutpurse on his trial. Any time these five minutes you must have been slain.”
Then it was I closed my eyes in the extremity of shame and never expected to open them again. But to my astonishment the forces of nature continued to operate, and soon, in a vertigo of fear and anger, I was fain to look for the cause. It seemed that my enemy had lowered his point and drawn off. Plainly he intended to use me as a cat uses a mouse, for his private pleasure. For that reason I fell the harder upon him, since I knew my life to be forfeit, and I had an instinct that the more furiously it was yielded the less should I know of a horrid end.
“I will now slit your doublet, my son,” said Sir Richard Pendragon. “Have you a favourite rib you would care to select? What of the fifth?”
Without more ado he began cutting my doublet with a dexterity that was amazing. His point flashed here and there across my breast and seemed to touch it in a thousand places; yet, although the old leather was pierced continually, no hap was suffered by my skin.
“If only I had my lighter and more fanciful blade of Ferrara here,” he said in the midst of a thousand fanfaronades and brandishments, “I would flick every button off your doublet so nicely as a tailor.”
“Kill me!” I cried, flinging myself upon his blade.